


the quiet sound of thunder

by seditonem



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-21
Updated: 2013-08-21
Packaged: 2017-12-24 05:27:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/935927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seditonem/pseuds/seditonem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim and Spock aren't exactly lawless convicts, but neither are they model citizens of Earth: branded renegades, they search out the government's uncontrollable genetically engineered quasi-human superspecies in order to protect people. But when they stumble on a new clan of vampires, things take a turn for the unexpected, and it'll change both their lives forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the quiet sound of thunder

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: strong graphic violence, gore, sexual situations, swearing.  
> disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. star trek does not belong to me. i wrote this a long time ago and i refuse to reread it, this is simply up for archive purposes. 
> 
> originally written for some star trek big bang in some year of my life.

**i.**

George Kirk doesn’t believe in God. He believes in the tangible, the things he can find around him. He believes in his wife, in his newborn child, in good earth and rain and the smell after a thunderstorm.

His radio crackles.

“George? It’s a boy!” 

She sounds tired. George’s heart clenches. 

He doesn’t believe in crying, but something very much like a tear is working its way down his cheek. The last of the charges on the doors are blowing, and in the darkness behind him he can see the tail-lights of the emergency trains. They're distant now, just pinpricks of light. One of them is heading back to the city centre with his wife and child aboard. He's made sure of that.

Two more charges to go. He can hold up that long. The smell of explosives and guns hangs in the air. 

George believes in government fuck-ups and war and the fact you can make a wolf give birth to a cat. 

“George, you should be here,” Winona whispers. She sounds reverent. He can imagine her touching their son’s cheek. 

“What’ll we call him?"

"We could name him after your dad," she half-laughs. It's a tired, happy sound. He can hear the soft beeps of the emergency medical systems in the background. He wired them himself. 

“What, Tiberius? Nah, that sucks,” he says. His voice is breaking a little. In his years in the labs, George has seen a lot of messed up people take refuge in humour. It’s almost scary to see it happen to himself. “We’ll name him after your dad. We’ll call him Jim.” 

“Jim it is,” she whispers. He wonders if she’s aware of anyone else in the room. 

One more charge to go. He’s showered in burning debris, hidden behind a ruined wall. He’s not sure where anyone else is, not after their research manager was killed earlier in a surprise attack when the test subjects escaped. 

“Sweetheart?” His voice cracks again. Jim sighs, bites his lip. “I love you.”

No more charges. 

ξ

In James T. Kirk’s experience, there is a sure-fire way to tell if it’s Monday morning or not – is your head being bashed against various inanimate objects by a vampire, or not? If the answer is yes, then, yes, it is a Monday, and you’ve spent the last six days tracking down the aforementioned vampire, finding its location, checking for a clan, and then moving in, possibly pretending to be a victim along the way, depending on how much blood you stole from a blood-bank on your way through the last town. Spock is probably elsewhere, keeping a lookout, getting fresh gun cartridges, scouting the house for information, or doing something else that’s vaguely useful, if he’s not mentally bitching about how you’ve fucked up the hospital system by stealing that blood. 

Today might be a Monday, though, Jim thinks, as his head connects with the arm of a sofa and he rolls to the side, but something is wrong. 

Oh, right. Spock’s in the same room with him. He’s searching through papers on the desk in the room, although what information you can glean from a half-crazed monster like a vampire, Jim doesn’t know. He ducks a flailing, long-nailed hand and reaches for his dagger. It’s a wicked, two-pronged thing almost as long as his forearm, sharper than anything else Jim owns, and it does the job pretty damn well. The job, being slicing off a head, that is. 

While he’s sliding it out, though, the hand catches him on the neck and slams him against the floor. Jim blinks blood out of his eyes and swears. His head rings for a second, feeling musty and heated, and he sticks out a hand at the vampire’s eyes, fingertips catching at the sensitive tissue. There’s a muted scream as he touches something painful, an old scar, perhaps, and the hand on his neck pulls away. Jim breathes hard, wiping the blood from his eyes, and scrabbles backwards on his ass, right hand clasped around the dagger. There’s an unearthly, piercing scream, and the vampire crouches right in front of him, lips pulled back to expose lengthy fangs. 

“Dear God, when was the last time you saw a dentist?” Jim spits out, before he can stop himself, his weakness for one-liners and old films catching him again, and the vampire springs at him, with panther-like grace. He has a split-second to raise the dagger and pump it into the creature’s neck, and then everything is still for a second. Black eyes slide up from where his fist meets flesh, and the vampire smirks at him. 

The problem with vampires is that you have to completely sever the head. Jim’s learnt that from years of narrow escapes and close shaves, but even the most experienced men miss sometimes. He can feel something crack as the vampire backhands him, and he goes flying into the wall. Plaster and wood splinter behind him and Jim moans feebly. He doesn’t have time to contemplate if he’s broken his spine, though, because those fangs are millimetres from his neck, and if he doesn’t do something soon, there won’t be a spine in his back to contemplate anymore. 

“Spock? A little help here, maybe?” he shouts, hands on the vampire’s shoulders, trying to break the death-grip it has on his shoulders. Somehow, it managed to get onto his thighs, and is sitting on him like an over-grown child, still grinning in that bone-shuddering way that all the vampires seem to have. The knife sticks sickeningly out of its neck, as if the vampire is just a waxworks figure in a display in a natural history museum. 

“I’m sure you can deal with it,” Spock says, placidly, and turns the page of a book. “After all, this information could be useful, Jim.” 

“Fuck,” Jim mutters, frowning, and then tenses his muscles, brain whirring. If he’s correct, he has one chance to get this right. 

The kick he planned goes exactly where he wanted, sending the vampire flying across to the other side of the room. Jim sucks in a breath of clear air, swallows hard, and waits for the vampire to get within striking range. It comes flying back at him, eyes blazing, voice like a banshee, and he meets it midair, springing up from a crouch. They collide and Jim manages to anchor it beneath him as they land. One hand uses a smaller dagger from his boot to pin it the floor, blade through its left wrist, and the other scrabbles around behind him, on the wreckage of the floor. In the struggle, the larger dagger has been lost, and he has seconds to try and find it. Seconds that run out quickly as he searches through the broken floorboards, and then his fingers clutch at smooth metal. 

The vampire makes a strangled sound, half whimper, half scream, and Jim cuts it off with the large dagger. The head rolls slightly to the left and is still. 

“Took your time,” Spock notes, as Jim sits back on the vampire’s thighs, panting. 

“Yeah, and a great help you were, too,” he snaps, wiping blood and sweat off his face with the back of a slightly dirty hand. The dust from the fight is beginning to settle, landing in peach-coloured flakes on the vampire’s face like a mask of concealer. 

“I felt you were in a better position to handle it.” Jim knows he’s being unfair. He and Spock have an agreement: Spock does the finding, the planning, and the arrangements. He settles the bribes, the finances. Jim does the dirty work. He kills for a living. It’s not even a living; they have to do a bit of stealing here and there, nothing too serious, and every now and then Spock sells one of his ideas for crop mutation to a small factory for a bit of hard cash. But they get by, most of the time. 

“What’d you find?” he asks, by way of apology, and thinks he sees the smallest fraction of a smile on Spock’s face. Spock rustles through a couple of papers, selecting one, and shoves it at Jim. Jim looks at him, raising an eyebrow. 

“Ah, right;” Spock nods, remembering Jim’s rule of If I’ve Just Fought, I Will Do Nothing Mentally Strenuous; “it’s a communication between vampires. I’ve no idea what the greater part of this says, sadly, but I’m guessing, from the symbols here and here, that there’s a gathering happening.”

“A gathering?” Jim pants, and frowns, already thinking of a glass of water. He’s really, incredibly thirsty. 

“Yes,” Spock says, quietly. “This is bad news.” He looks up at Jim, the slightest of frowns on his face. 

“Telling me,” Jim sighs, wiping at his face one more time. He pushes up off the vampire’s body, searching in his pocket for matches, as Spock passes him the gasoline. “You got everything you need?” Spock nods, and leaves through the back door, sheaf of papers in hand. His bag is slung lightly over his shoulder, empty now that the canister of fuel is in Jim’s hand. Jim takes a last look around the ruined room, the body of the vampire, and pours the liquid fuel carefully over the body. The floor is wood, so hopefully the building will catch quickly, but to be sure he douses the walls too, till there’s nothing left in the canister. 

He throws a match over his shoulder as he leaves, dagger in hand. 

“Pity,” Spock murmurs, watching the house burn down.

“About the life?” Jim asks. He’s wondering about the man who that vampire once was, before he grew fangs and got night-vision and learned to love bloodshed more than the sound of laughter. 

“About the house. Useful location,” Spock corrects, and starts the car. 

∞

Jim brushes his teeth under the dim fluorescent light in the bathroom, spitting out copper-coloured toothpaste into the lime-green basin. His gums are sore from the punches to the jaw he took, and there’s a large, egg-shaped bruise on his stomach, just below his left rib-cage. 

“Painful?” Spock asks, as Jim rinses his mouth out with some of the equally copper-coloured water. You’d have thought that by 2250 they’d have cleaner, more sanitary water for all, but no. But not for lack of trying, Jim reminds himself. 

“What d’you think?” he mutters, rubbing a hand over his face in an effort to try and stay awake. Cool fingers prod lightly at the bruise till he hisses, and then Spock rubs something cold and slick over the sore skin, and then bandages his hurt ribs carefully. Slowly, Spock washes the bloody scrapes and cuts on his back, neck and face with antiseptic liquid, not quite enough to burn, and patches him up, as he does every time. When he’s finished, Jim is half asleep again, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. 

“You may sleep now,” Spock reminds him, once he’s packed up his medical kit, and leaves the room. Jim sits there for a minute longer, pressing the nail of his middle finger against the pad of his thumb until it hurts, and then washes his feet carefully with the head of the shower. Once the worst of the dirt is gone, the blackness between his toes eradicated, he limps into the bedroom, sprawling out on the king sized bed Spock had somehow managed to wheedle out of the manager. 

“Sometimes, Spock, I love you,” he mumbles, through the threadbare duvet. 

“So you say,” Spock notes, pushing his glasses up his nose as he spreads the papers from his bag out over the floor. He sits cross-legged in the middle of the circle of correspondence, frowning at the symbols. 

“’night,” Jim says, eyes already shut, and falls asleep with his dirty, worn black combat trousers still on. 

“Pleasant dreams,” Spock replies, out of habit, already lost trying to work out what the tiny devil with the forked tail and violin means when placed next to the tree on fire. There was a time when this would have been easy for him to work out; he’d have had no problem a couple of years ago, but now the memory of code patterns has all but faded. It’s on the edge of his vision, laughing at him as it pulls away. He used to teach classes in code a like this, before he met Jim Kirk. 

Spock’s father was part of the first Vulcan crew to come to Earth. They’d found a planet on the edge of existence, torn apart by its own people. The planet’s climate was destroying itself, and the resources they had weren’t enough to survive for another ten years. A third world war had just ended, leaving half of the planet’s surface in ruin, and the other half full of toxic waste. The Vulcans, well aware of the nuclear power humanity had discovered, were a little shocked that anything was still standing. The second ship to land on Earth had brought a sustainable fuel from Vulcan, as well as advanced technology to establish a peace. 

Then it had gone wrong. Once the people had decided their planet was stable enough, and they’d mastered Vulcan technology, they retreated to their own settlements, taking the fuel and the two ships with them. Spock wasn’t sure what had happened after that. He knew only that most of the members of the two crews had been killed, and that Vulcan wouldn’t send more ships. They’d decided Earth was a lost cause, and that there was no point waging a war with a race so determined to keep themselves to themselves. The humans, in the meantime, had decided to make the most of their restored planet - by advancing their own species. 

That was where the vampires came from. The name may have come from old lore, but there was little else apart from fangs and speed to identify the race with their myths. Vampires, the third race of humanity to inhabit the Earth. Faster, stronger, ruthless. They had been bred to kill first, and ask questions later. With their keener vision and faster reflexes, they were the perfect warriors; but their bloodlust made them undesirable. They might have had the same higher brain functions as humans, but that was often overruled by the impulse to kill. 

The lab creating them had inadequate security facilities. While Spock’s father had found a woman to marry and settled down to blend innocuously into society, the Lab X3 had been destroyed by a small group of vampires. While Spock was kept at home, to be home-schooled, lest his green blood give him away if he got into a fight, the vampires multiplied, spread, and grew stronger. They had no understanding of eugenics, but natural selection was nothing if not present in every species, and as they fought among one another, they improved upon themselves. By the time Spock had managed to get into university, to study Egyptology and hieroglyphics, the vampire population was a sixth of the human one, and growing rapidly. 

In his twelfth year as a lecturer at the University of Chicago, Spock had been walking through the halls of the British Museum, trying to find their exhibition on Egypt, when he had run into James T. Kirk. More specifically, Jim had run into _him_. As he’d stopped to consult the map, a body connected with his, and he’d looked up from the floor to see piercing blue eyes staring right at his.

“Oh, God, whoops, sorry, man,” Jim had said, offering him a hand. “I’d stay and help, but I’m kinda –” he’d stopped, staring at the exit, and bit his lip, pulling a face.

“Do you require help?” Spock had asked, on a whim, and Jim had pulled him up and dragged him after him, through the halls. 

As it was, Spock did see the Egypt exhibition. He saw it for one minute, as Jim Kirk dragged him through it, out the other side, through a back doorway, and across the crowded courtyard of the British Museum. It turned out he was wanted by most of the police in England, and they’d managed to steal a boat and sail back to America while Spock tried to figure out exactly who Jim was. At first he’d thought spy, or perhaps a criminal. 

It was worse. Jim was a vampire hunter, one of the renegades who took the law into their own hands and hunted the new species, either for fun or for bounty. It wasn’t widely known, but the government usually turned a blind eye if a man like Jim rid a community of a vampire and then took whatever property it left behind. Jim made full use of this – he had a pretty heavy-duty Jeep, which ran on a reliable hydrogen fuel cell, and he could usually find enough money to finance his clothes and weapons. They got on well enough, except the first time Jim had tried to make Spock kill one of the vampires. He’d refused; he couldn’t risk Jim finding out that he was Vulcan if his green blood gave him away. Jim had, eventually, accepted that Spock was better as the tactical side of things, and their roles became established. 

In his sleep, Jim shifts, turning over, and Spock looks up from the symbol of the devil with the forked tail. His eyes feel sore; he’s obviously been looking at the paper for too long. Jim’s figure blurs and focuses in front of Spock’s lenses, and he sighs. 

Sleep, perhaps, would be a better option. He leaves the papers in a neat pile, devil at the bottom, and crawls into bed beside Jim. Once, when he was younger, his father had bought him a cat. It had spread over the bottom of the bed, and the side, leaving Spock a quarter of the usual space to sleep in. Jim Kirk sleeps like that cat, spread-eagle over the sheets, breathing deep and slow.

∞

“It’s Tuesday, isn’t it?” Spock blinks, adjusting to the light, and sits up in bed. Jim is watching him from the other side of the bed, still lying down, and his eyes are only half open. If you weren’t looking carefully, he might appear asleep. Spock has spent too much time with him to think so, though. In the five years they’ve hunted together, he’s learnt about as much about Jim Kirk as he wants to know. 

“Yes,” is all he says, stretching his fingers. They feel cramped from driving the night before. He fumbles for his glasses and slides out of bed, padding over to the small kitchenette to try and find some eggs. They have eggs for breakfast on Tuesday, as much a reward for Monday’s hard work as a preparation for the next week of work. 

“Y’know, people used to think vampires were sexy, Spock,” Jim remarks, leaning on his elbows on the bed.

“Ah,” Spock comments, cracking two eggs into the pan and seasoning them with a pinch of marjoram. His mother did teach him how to cook, after all. While they settle on the heat, he slices two large tomatoes, only slightly overripe, and poaches them in the microwave. Jim watches appreciatively from the bed. 

“I’m serious, here,” he continues, after a minute. “They were really popular. I found an article on it on a website while we were looking for the last guy. You ever hear of _Twilight_?” 

Spock pauses, and then goes back to scrambling the eggs. “No,” he says, humouring Jim. Tuesdays may mean eggs, but they also mean conversation.

“Right. Well, ever heard of an _Edward Cullen_ , then?” Jim prods, and Spock smiles thinly. He has heard the term before, now that he thinks of it.

“Indeed – that’s a phrase used to describe one of the more charming of the species, am I correct?” There are two plates waiting on the counter as the toast pops, and he spreads low fat margarine thinly over the top. Jim pulls a large, woolly jumper out of his bag and sits down at the tiny table in the room, grabbing two pairs of knives and forks as he goes past. Spock puts the plates down as Jim pours them each a glass of orange juice, and they concentrate on eating for five minutes.

“Actually, it’s used to describe a specific vampire manoeuvre,” Jim corrects him; mouth full of egg, once most of his toast is gone. Spock tries not to show his displeasure at the bad table manners. “Sometimes one of the clan, or an individual working on its own, will try and lure a human by being, well, excessively protective. There’s nothing like love to inspire complete and utter trust, hmm?” 

Spock nods, adding a little bit of pepper to his tomatoes. Jim drains his glass of orange juice and sits back in his chair, licking his thumb to catch a stray piece of egg. “Ever seen one in progress?” 

“Never,” Spock admits, sipping at his juice. “Is it common?”

“There wouldn’t be a name for it if there wasn’t, would there?” Jim grins, and starts washing up the frying pan. “Do we have a case?” 

“I’m not sure. I’ve heard some information about a small but powerful clan one state over from us, but nothing for certain,” Spock sighs, handing him the plates, and goes to find the papers. They keep in vague contact with other vampire killers like themselves, enough to know if one area is a lost cause or too dangerous. Spock returns with his bag, and the breakfast things are replaced by vampire code and two large maps; the mundane and ordinary replaced by the law-breaking. 

“What state are we in, anyway?” Jim mutters, lighting a cigarette. 

“Iowa, I believe,” Spock replies, quietly, and stubs the cigarette out perilously close to Jim’s hand before he can react. “Not near the documents.” 

“Sorry,” huffs Jim, and moves his chair next to Spock’s.

“There,” Spock points to the west of California, “is where I’ve heard of the clan. It’s small, maybe not more then two or three, but that’s big enough for a fair challenge. I do not know if we are able to take on a group, yet, experienced as we may be. It would require a lot of physical power from you.” Jim nods. He might be occasionally reckless, but he’s not stupid. 

“I’ve heard this part is still ruined,” he states, indicating to the west of Arizona, before moving his hand further south. “There used to be a factory there, am I right? We can pass by it on the way there.” 

“I doubt we’ll get any munitions there,” Spock frowns, and sits back in his chair. “I assume we’ll just have to buy, again.”

“Damn, they charge so much these days,” Jim sighs, pulling a face. “We gotta start learning how to do these things ourselves.” 

“Impractical,” Spock reminds him, and taps his fingers on the edge of the table. 

“Ah, what the hell, let’s check this clan out,” Jim grins, after a minute of silence, and gets up. “If it’s too tough, we can spread the word, and leave it up to the others. Sound good?” Spock nods, folding up the maps, and packs his bag of papers again. Jim makes the bed hastily, stuffing clothes into their bags as he goes, and runs a dampened hand through his hair before they dress and leave. “Need thicker socks, by the way,” he comments, as Spock locks the door behind him. 

They nod at the hotel owner as Spock hands over the key and settles the account. Jim always finds it strange that it took a world war and a new breed of super-humans for society to accept the idea of homosexuality completely. But then, by that time, most people had abandoned the idea of religion, and since a lot of women had been killed when the Western nursing camps had been bombed, the idea of male companionship looked a lot more favourable when compared to a life alone. Not that he and Spock have that sort of relationship – they might sleep in the same bed, but that is generally to throw authorities off their tail. Also, it saves on heating. Jim doesn’t really stick to the ideas of straight or gay, and he isn’t sure if Vulcans have the same ideas, but neither of them are really picky when it comes to the gender of a partner. Spock just generally requires a warning, preferably before he opens the door to find Jim in a state of undress. 

Then again, neither of them really have time for pleasure in a life like this. Tuesday mornings are about as good as it gets. 

The car runs pretty smoothly on the dirt roads between Arizona and California. It’s a long drive, so they take turns once Spock’s hands start cramping up. Jim likes to joke it’s because he spends too much time jerking off, but Spock usually replies that if that would apply to anyone, it would be Jim. The conversation usually halts after that, so neither of them mention the joke this time. Along the way they find a small café, where Jim buys more junk food than they’ll ever eat, and flirts a little with the waitress. Spock rolls his eyes covertly and waits in the car.

“Fuck yes, being polite _pays off_ ,” Jim grins, triumphantly, as he swings into the car and slams the door shut behind him. He’s holding two magazines of silver bullets, and a pack of chewy sweets. “Girls like the bad boys, dontcha know.” 

“And she’s probably phoning the Informers right now, telling them there’s a pair of renegades heading into California,” Spock sighs. Jim’s smile vaporises as they drive off. They both know that informing on renegades will get you paid at least fifty times as much as those bullets are worth. 

“You don’t think – oh. Shit,” he says, burying his head in his hands, only to be jolted upright a second later as Spock purposely hits a pothole in the road. 

“We can change plates down the road,” he reassures Jim, after a minute, and turns the corner off the main dirt road onto a smaller side-road that’ll take them through the ruins. 

“It gets me every time,” Jim says, after half an hour. He’s talking about the ruins of the cities. Neither he nor Spock ever saw them at their peak, when there were sky-scrapers and people on every street corner. They’ve heard the stories, though, Jim from his mother, and Spock from lessons at school. His teachers had insisted that the war had been a good thing – it had brought a final peace, hadn’t it? - but it was hard to see their point of view when you were driving past mass graves. Broken windows still stood upright, and there were even tattered curtains. Everything of use or value had been pillaged years before, when the scars on the land were recent, before they healed. Now, creepers and plants were beginning to grow over the rubble, twisting through open door-frames, climbing gently over blocks of stone and headless statues. 

“Indeed,” Spock agrees, quietly, and turns past the wreckage of an old church. “You should sleep.” It’s beginning to get dark, and they’re not anywhere near where the clan is rumoured to be yet. He turns the headlights on low, bringing the night vision screen down for easier navigation, and makes sure all the windows are shut tightly. It’s not ideal to be caught in the ruins at night, but since the car is well-nigh silent and well equipped, they’ll probably be able to get away with it. 

“Yeah, yeah, I should,” Jim agrees, putting the seat back, and reaching back for a blanket. “Wake me for changeover.” 

∞

Spock enjoys driving, most of the time, unless his fingers cramp up. He only realises he’s been driving all night long when dawn breaks over the top of a man made mountain of rubble, light glinting off the polished stone, made smooth by decades of rain and snow. The worn shape of a gun’s handle sticks out at an angle; _must be what’s left of the ammunition factory_ , Spock thinks, taking a left turn. 

“Hey, what time is it?” Jim mumbles, blinking sleep out of his eyes. He sits up, bumping his head on the top of the car, and abruptly lies back down, moaning a little. “Goddamn car,” he mutters, and looks accusingly at Spock. 

“Around four in the morning,” Spock replies, checking the time on his watch. It’s too risky to use a satellite powered one, so they both use the old-fashioned battery operated ones. Jim has two replacements charging in the boot, underneath the multiple gun magazines and two AK-47s he’s stored for safe-keeping. 

“You forgot to wake me,” he grouches, and rolls onto his side, facing Spock. “I can pull my own weight.” 

Spock watches him flinch as he applies weight to the bruise on his ribs and raises an eyebrow. “Not quite yet.” 

“Yeah, yeah,” Jim sighs, lying on his back again. “Let’s stop for breakfast and I’ll drive for a bit. Gotta wake up first, though.” 

“We’re almost out of the ruins,” Spock notes, taking a sharp right turn. He’s right – the forest is right in front of them, green and tangled, a confused mess. Jim keeps wondering if there was something the government put in the soil, so the forests would grow up and over the ruins, hiding the evidence of what they’ve done, because there’s something strange about how fast they’ve grown. Some of the trees are huge, casting vast leafy shadows over the car as they pass along. They stop beneath a tree with a fat trunk, its branches reaching desperately for the sky, and Spock finds some slightly stale bread and a hunk of cheese in the trunk. Jim eats on the bonnet of the car, watching the sun rise, fat and pale in the sky, with Spock sitting on the grass nearby. 

“Spock?” he asks, finally. 

“Yes?” 

“What’s it like – having a job?” Jim has asked this question before. Spock used to be honest - _normal, average, eat three meals a day, get a girlfriend, answer phonecalls, ignore the evidence of the war, live in vague fear of vampires, stay in small walled-off communities_ \- but now he paints Jim an idealistic picture. Something for Jim to strive for, so they have reason to protect humanity from the alpha-race. 

“Soft beds, clean water, whatever you want for breakfast,” he begins, pulling a green apple out of his pocket and peeling it with a small knife. He eats the peel first, the taste sharp and bitter in his mouth, and then cuts Jim a quarter, throwing it across to him. He catches it without watching, and eats it slowly as Spock bites into the soft flesh. “Wife, parents, phonecalls. Good sleep every evening.” He doesn’t go into details; from the look on Jim’s face, he can paint the picture well enough himself. 

“Hey, we should get going,” Jim says, after a couple of minutes. Spock yawns behind his hand, standing up to stretch slowly, and slips into the recently vacated passenger seat. He falls asleep as the car moves off, hoping he’s remembered to tell Jim not to take the low road, because there are twenty-seven potholes. 

∞

“Hey, wake up,” Jim whispers, shaking Spock’s shoulder gently. He hardly needs to; the Vulcan is awake within seconds. “We’re near the border.” 

“We’ve still got a couple of miles to go, then,” Spock frowns. It’s dark already, and he needs to empty his bladder before they go any further. 

“Need to stop for fuel,” Jim reminds him, opening the door with a suspicious squeak. “And oil the hinges,” he amends, pulling a bottle of oil from the glove compartment. Spock sits in the passenger seat, not quite fully awake, watching the sun go down. “What day is it?” Jim shouts, from where he’s putting fuel into the car. 

“Wednesday,” Spock replies, quietly, as the last rays of twilight dip over the horizon. There’s no real need to fear the darkness – the vampires have no hatred of light, so it’s no more likely that they’ll attack at night. As with most criminals, though, the absence of light provides perfect cover for their activities. He shivers slightly as Jim gets back into the car and drives on. 

“This route, right?” he asks, after a minute, pointing to a slightly lighter patch on the night vision screen. Spock nods and Jim takes a blindingly sharp right turn onto a bumpy road. “Just once,” Jim mutters, hands in a white-knuckle grip on the wheel, “I want to drive on a tarmac road.” Spock winces and internally agrees. 

He’s about to warn Jim to keep an eye on the road, instead of checking their location on the lap that’s spread out in his lap, when something hits the front of the car and splatters onto the windscreen. “What the fuck – ?” 

“Mind the steering!” Spock shouts, as they career off the road into darkness. Jim stops the car just short of a tree, slamming them both backwards in their seats, and Spock takes a deep breath. “Turn on the toplights,” he commands, quietly, half not wanting to see what’s there. 

Jim clicks on the lights on the roof of the car. There’s a red splatter on the windscreen, along with something darker. “I’m going to check,” Jim whispers, and opens the door slowly. He keeps his hand on the door, moving like a ghost, and Spock loads the gun they keep next to the steering wheel. “I – I think it’s dead.”

“Roadkill?” Spock asks, genuinely curious, and Jim chuckles darkly. 

Suddenly there’s silence. “Jim?” Spock calls, looking out the driver’s side. The moonlight glints through the trees, and he can just make out something that might be Jim’s leather jacket, and then –

“Put the gun down.” It’s not a request. Spock climbs out of the driver’s side and holds his hands up, so whoever has Jim can see his hands. Slowly, no sudden movements, he puts the gun on the ground. “Step backwards, towards the car. One false move and I slit his throat.” 

“I don’t believe I’ve made your acquaintance?” he asks, trying to figure out who’s in the darkness. Jim makes a choked sound and Spock can see him fall to his knees, gasping in the shadow. He looks up at Spock, moonlight catching in his eyes, and Spock bites his lip. 

“You haven’t.” It’s a hard accent, from somewhere Spock can’t quite place. He can see half of the man’s face now; rugged, with fairly neat hair. There’s a slight beard and a polar-neck jumper beneath a jacket. 

“Would you mind letting go of my... associate?” he ventures, and the man laughs darkly. 

“Answer some questions; we’ll see how it goes.” Spock nods, his throat dry. If Jim dies, his life goes down the drain. Jim had told him about the vampires – he owes Jim everything, whether he wants admit it or not. The day in the British Museum had changed his life forever; the truth changed everything forever. 

“Why are you here?” 

“We’re on our way south. There’s a small clan of vampires. We’re looking to kill them.”

“Bounty hunters, eh?” the man laughs, and Spock can hear Jim choke again, gurgling a little as he struggles to breathe. 

“You could say that,” Spock agrees, and sighs in relief as he sees Jim being pushed forwards, still breathing, to land face down in the dirt. 

“Keep your lives. You’re too late, anyway,” sighs the man, and that’s when Spock notices the blood. He’s bleeding everywhere, staining the back of Jim’s head and hands. 

“You’re hurt,” Jim splutters, as the man drops to his knees. He stares at the bloodied hand that covers the wound, his eyes moving up to look at the face of the man who might have killed him. The man stares back, an intelligent, calculating gaze that Jim instantly likes.

“Thank you, captain obvious,” the man laughs, weakly, and Jim catches him just before he falls to his face. Spock rushes to the boot of the car, grabbing the hurricane lamp and the medical kit. In the harsh glare of the lamp, the man looks middle-aged, perhaps in his late thirties. A sports player, maybe – Spock can’t tell. He pushes up the jumper, stitching the skin together as quickly as possible. “No, not like that – you’re doing it wrong!” he barks, and Spock frowns. 

“How would you know?” Jim asks, indignantly, holding the man’s shoulders down.

“Because I’m a doctor, goddammit,” he tells Jim, and then passes out. 

 

**ii.**

Neither of them say anything as they fit the man’s body into the back of the car. He’s breathing steadily, a dull flush on his sallow cheeks, but Spock can tell he’s feverish. He checks his temperature and pulse as Jim cleans the windscreen. Before they leave, he digs a hole by the side of the road and buries what’s left of the severed head that splattered across the glass the night before. It’s dawn by the time they leave.

Two minutes down the road the man wakes up, moaning in discontent. “No,” he mutters, and then becomes desperate, clutching at Jim’s shoulder from the back seat. “No, we have to go back for her.” His fingers are tight, hot against Jim’s skin.

“Go back for who?” Jim asks, trying at once to talk to him, look at him, and drive. 

“Keep your eyes on the road,” Spock reminds him, quietly, so Jim stops the car and turns to look at the man.

“Go back for who?” he repeats, looking the man in the eye.

“There was a woman, back at the house. We killed two vampires; she helped me, I have to help her –” Jim turns the car around abruptly, driving back the way they came and taking the lane on the left when the man points over his shoulder. 

“Jim, this is incredibly unwise. By all accounts she is probably dead by now,” Spock sighs, bracing himself against the dashboard as they hurtle through the undergrowth. 

“You of all people should understand the idea of a debt,” Jim shouts, over the noise of cracking branches and foliage being destroyed by the car. 

“I of all people,” Spock echoes, hollowly, and shuts his eyes. Jim has never used the fact that he told Spock the truth as an advantage, even though both of them know that Spock feels that he owes Jim for opening his eyes. It feels almost painful to have it used like this. Spock dismisses it, knowing that Jim is probably feeling desperate, or is speaking without thinking, as humans so often do. In the back of his mind, he wonders fleetingly if he should tell Jim about his true parentage, before he gets injured and Jim finds out the hard way, and then something catches his eye and the thought it lost. 

“Hey, wake up, there’s a house ahead.” Jim stops the car, grabs the gun and gets out, slamming the door behind him. They’re in a silent clearing, not too far from the wreckage – perhaps it had once been a holiday cottage, before the war. Spock follows him cautiously, hardly making a sound. However skilled Jim might be at hunting, Spock has a natural grace and ease of movement that he can never quite match. “Amazing how they always seem to find places away from civilization,” Jim comments, a grim smile on his face, and kicks the door in. 

“Move and you die,” a voice commands, and Jim raises his hands slowly, dropping the gun. Spock thinks he hears him mutter _oh, not again_ under his breath, and then a woman staggers into view, and his mind is wiped blank. 

“Uhura?” he whispers, and her eyes turn to his.

“Professor Spock?” she gapes, her gun lowering. He struggles to say something, anything, but she pushes past Jim and into his arms, knocking the breath out of him with a hug. 

“It is... good to see you again, Uhura,” Spock notes, holding her shoulders so he can pull her back to inspect her for damage. “You were with the doctor, correct?” 

“We were both here alone; I saw him take on the first vampire. He’s inexperienced but a fairly good fighter, nothing extraordinary. I shot one to slow it down and helped him take it out. The second got me from behind, but I think I managed to partially sever the head,” she reports, and he nods. 

“Wait, wait, Spock, didn’t you say there were three?” Jim asks, shouldering his way into the conversation. Spock looks up at him just in time to catch a glimpse of something dark in the woods behind, and then Jim is barrelled over, falling to the ground under the weight of another vampire. Spock can hear him cursing, and then Uhura raises her gun and aims a shot into the side of the vampire’s head. It’s catapulted to the side, leaving Jim panting on the ground, scrabbling for his dagger. “C’mere, cupcake,” he coaxes, as the vampire springs towards him again. 

Spock watches with the smallest of flinches as the head goes flying, an arc of blood landing on the ground with a barely audible splat. Uhura shudders in his arms, her gun still raised. The empty bullet cartridge lies glinting on the ground like a fat golden slug as Jim staggers towards them. 

“Uhura? What kind of a first name is that?” 

“It’s my last name,” she corrects, straightening a little so she’s standing side by side with Spock. 

“Right, whatever; what’re you doing out here? You don’t look like a renegade,” Jim notes, looking her up and down with a gaze that even Spock can feel. He’s right - she’s only just shorter than him, her black hair pulled back in an exact pony-tail, completely at odds with her white shirt, crumpled, bloody and covered in dirt, and her worn tight blue jeans. She looks more like she’s on a holiday gone wrong than a vampire killer.

“I dropped out and came looking for killers. There are two bodies in that hut. They belong to my parents.” Spock has to give her credit – her voice doesn’t even wobble. She looks Jim right in the eye until he has to look away, moving to the hut. He comes back after a minute, throwing a match over his shoulder. He and Spock roll the body of the dead vampire into the flames and stand back. Uhura doesn’t even protest at the treatment of her parents’ bodies, but Spock rationalises that she probably doesn’t know what else to do with them. Immediate burial is the safest, in eighty percent of cases. 

“We should return to the doctor,” he reminds Jim, after a minute, and they move back to the car. The doctor is covered in a light, sticky sweat, shuddering on the back seat. “I will stay with him; we will need to track down the third vampire – the one Uhura said was half decapitated. We’ll head for our original destination – there’s a ninety percent probability it has returned to its original hiding place.” The car starts again and Jim reverses slowly up the dirt road and onto the main track.

“So, Uhura. I’m Jim Kirk.” A pause. “They don’t have first names where you come from?” he asks, after half an hour. Spock catches her gaze in the mirror and goes back to treating the doctor’s wound. It’s now a weeping mouth, stitched up carefully but inexpertly by his own hand. There’s silence for a couple of minutes. “You said you dropped out; what were you studying?” Spock almost feels sorry for Jim, struggling for something to say. Almost.

“Pictograms,” Uhura says, shortly. “You have no idea what that means.” 

“Sure I do,” Jim replies, confidently. “Cuneiform, asemics, _hieroglyphics_ ,” he says, drawling the last word out sinfully slow. Spock knows that tone; that’s the one he uses on waitresses in small bars. He also knows the look Jim gives him as he says it; that’s the one that says _I’ve figured you out_. 

“I’m impressed; for a moment there I thought you were just a dumb renegade who only sleeps with waitresses,” Uhura smirks. Spock has to admire the way she manages to both compliment and insult Jim in the same sentence. 

“Well, not only,” Jim grins, and turns a corner. They come out into a flat, open land, empty save for the dirt track in front of them. It’s practically desert terrain, stretching out for miles on end. “Spock? Do we have enough water?” 

“Provided we make the crossing in a day, we will have adequate resources,” Spock confirms, checking the doctor’s temperature. 

“Well, get ready to overheat,” Jim announces, grimly, and drives on. 

∞

“I never, ever want to do that again.” Jim’s not the only one who’s thinking it; Uhura has pushed her seat back, top button of her dirty white blouse open as she fans herself with one hand; Spock has opted for a cold cloth on the back of his neck, and the doctor has had his polar-neck jumper removed forcibly, leaving a thin t-shirt, since he’s still out cold. At least his temperature has reduced. He should be conscious within a day, Spock calculates. Jim, himself, has gone for the most direct route, removing his jacket and shirt so he’s driving wearing only his black combat trousers and heavy boots. “We need a different car,” he calls back to Spock, over the noise of the engine. 

“I doubt we can find a better model,” Spock reminds him. Not unless they kill a billionaire. 

They’ve come out of the desert into a hilly country, a little greener. There are deer around, who stop and stare at the car as it trundles past. The bright green makes a direct contrast with Jim’s sunburnt pink shoulders, rapidly beginning to blister from the half an hour he spent out of the car trying to fill up the tank and check the tires. “Yeah, whatever; do we take a left here?” Jim dismisses him, pointing to a small turning ahead. 

They take the turning with Spock’s affirmative, just as the doctor wakes up. 

“What’s going on?” he asks, and Jim nearly swerves into a deer. It bolts away over a hill, followed by two of its fellows, and Jim brings them to a shuddering halt, turning to the back seat.

“You’re awake,” he grins, and no one in the car misses the doctor’s gaze on Jim’s body, least of all Jim himself. “What’s your name? We can’t go on referring to you as _the doctor_ , not with Spock doing all the patching up around here.” 

“Leonard McCoy. And if you don’t let me get out of here right now, I might throw up on you. I get motion sickness,” McCoy says, and Spock hastily opens the door. McCoy half falls out onto the sparse grass, breathing deeply. 

“You know the best way to cure something is to meet it head on,” Jim says, a few minutes later, watching McCoy watch the sky. The doctor starts a little, his eyes flicking up to where Jim stands, and then he looks away. “What were you doing taking on three vampires?” 

McCoy lies on his back, frowning, and then he looks directly at Jim for a minute, and back to the clouds. “My wife,” he says, eventually.

“Ah – revenge, huh?” Jim says, grimly, handing the doctor a flask of whiskey that he keeps in his jacket for just such moments. 

“Not for her,” McCoy grunts. “My daughter.” At Jim’s look of confusion he sighs, hands back the flask, and stares resolutely at the sky. “My wife was an engineer. She knew the effects of the virus – hell, she had the virus herself - but that didn’t matter to her. Oh, no, she believed the virus brought longer life, never mind the blood-thirsty side effects. My own child tried to attack me. I had to watch her get murdered by two men from the village. They took everything from me, left me to die after that – all I’ve got left is my bones. I don’t know where my wife is – but I’m gonna find her.” 

“We should leave before the sun sets,” Spock interrupts, looking at the horizon. “I know of a small house a mile from here where we can rest for the night.” 

“I’m sorry about your daughter,” Jim says, quietly, catching McCoy’s arm before they get into the car. He wonders if he’s imagining it, but it feels like McCoy leans slightly into his grasp.

“We’ve all lost someone these days,” McCoy shrugs, and opens the door. 

They find the house not long after that; it’s a small, tumbledown affair, with solid windows and a good doorframe in contrast to a leaking roof. It begins to rain the minute they get through the door, and Jim hurries back outside to park the car in the tiny garage. It scrapes the walls a little, and he winces as a fleck of paint comes off. “Don’t be such a child,” Uhura smirks, unpacking the food. 

“I believe we’ll need to ration,” Spock frowns, counting up the two loaves of bread and other sparse provisions they have left. “We were not expecting others.” Uhura shrugs and cuts a loaf in half, tearing a piece for herself as she goes. Spock finds a couple of onions, two cans of tomatoes, and some imitation beef, using the portable gas stove from the car to make a stew to go with the bread. The rain continues to hurtle down at breakneck speed as they eat. 

After supper, Spock unpacks the papers while Jim washes the dishes. Uhura looks fascinated by the pictograms, her face lighting up as Spock points out his favourites. McCoy dozes by the doorway, head pillowed by his coat and boots. Jim throws a t-shirt at him, in replacement for the torn one he’s wearing, and pretends he’s not watching as the doctor pulls his old one off. “Thanks,” McCoy mutters, and Jim sits down next to him with a broken radio, pulling the back off to tinker with the wires inside. 

“Your wife’s like them, then?” he asks, moving so his back is to the wall. McCoy cracks an eye open and stares at him a while before making a noise of vague agreement. “That’s tough.” 

“Yeah, well, could’ve been worse – I could’ve loved her. Besides, s’not like she wasn’t a blood-thirsty bitch before she got like that,” McCoy sighs, shifting a little. Jim grins, twisting a screw inside the radio. “Why do you hunt vampires?” 

Jim leans his head back against the wall, his forearms resting on his knees, staring at the ceiling. He doesn’t understand the need to tell McCoy all about his life, but it’s there anyway. The silence stretches on for a while until McCoy is looking at Jim. “My dad died on the day I was born. There was a secondary break-out that day; he was working at the plant where they were trying to adapt the virus. The families lived there too. He blew up the plant while we got out. Mom and I were lucky to escape alive.” 

“Jesus,” McCoy breathes, quietly, staring at the ceiling. A drop of water hits the ground between them. 

“Jesus has nothing to do with it,” Jim says, coldly, and twists another screw savagely, almost regretting talking about it. “It wasn’t an accident that there was a break-out. Someone planned it. There’s someone behind all the break-outs.” He stops, laughing grimly. “Spock thinks I’m crazy, with all these conspiracy theories, but there’s more to these creatures than you think.” 

“No, I get what you mean. The two we came across were talking – I don’t know what language it was, but they were drawing something in the dirt. I think I crushed the pattern when I took the first one down, but it looked like a landscape,” McCoy agrees, sitting up, and Jim licks his lips, hungry for information. McCoy’s gaze catches on the movement as Jim puts the radio down, turning his full attention to him. ♫

“A landscape? What kind?” he asks, eagerly.

“I don’t know – maybe hills? I think there was a lake, perhaps trees. It was hard to decipher,” the doctor sighs, running his hands through his hair so it stands up in spikes for a second. 

“Spock, did you hear that?” Jim calls, looking up at where Spock and Uhura are standing. The Vulcan nods, frowning down at a map spread out on the table. 

“The nearest lake is further south of here; artificial,” he replies, pointing at an area on the map. “It would take us twelve hours to get there, driving at top speed, by my calculations.” 

“No point going if we’re not sure, though,” Jim frowns, leaning back against the wall again. 

“We should probably all get some sleep, first,” Uhura states, quickly, her hand on Spock’s shoulder, and McCoy sits up, raising a hand.

“I second that,” he nods, and Jim puts the broken radio down on the table, checking the bedrooms. 

“There are three beds,” he calls back. “Spock and I can share.” Spock and Uhura walk past, leaving Jim to collect his bag from the main room. 

“Are you and he, y’know - ?” McCoy asks, eyebrow raised. 

“What? Oh, no, no! No, we’re just used to it,” Jim grins, laughing at McCoy’s expression. “It throws authorities off our tail, most of the time. They’re looking for two different guys, not a pair.” 

“Right,” McCoy replies, to the empty room, long after Jim has gone. 

∞

Morning arrives misty and cold, but clears and heats gradually. Jim shivers a little in his jacket as he starts the car. Spock and Uhura load the car as McCoy dabs antiseptic onto his wound, pulling a face as it stings. He passes the wipes to Jim before they set off, who gives his own scrapes a once-over. They’ve decided to head for their original destination, hopefully to finish the last vampire off. Uhura and Spock sit in the back, being the slimmest of the party, squashed in between boxes and bags. Jim found a box of gun magazines in the basement of the house, obviously left there by a previous renegade, and it’s sandwiched between them in the middle of the back seats. “You comfortable back there?” Jim grins, looking back through the overhead mirror as he pulls out of the garage.

“Perfectly,” Spock replies, crisply, and watches Uhura dozing in her seat out of the corner of his eye for the next hour that they drive. McCoy struggles with the maps, and eventually gives them over to Spock, muttering something about being a doctor, not a navigator. Jim thinks, privately, that it probably makes his motion sickness worse. 

He gets them through seven miles of hills, deer and partial grassland before they come to more ruins. “You sure this is the right way?” he asks, squinting at the horizon. Most of the mist has cleared now, leaving just a smoky aura in the air. 

“Positive,” Spock reassures him, eyes on the map, and looks again at the lake. There’s a small forest nearby, as McCoy said, but part of him isn’t convinced that whatever the vampires were talking about is there. In any case, the only way to find out is to get there. “How much training do you have in the slaughter of vampires, doctor?” he asks McCoy, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the glare. 

“None, apart from the other day,” McCoy shouts back, and Uhura shifts in her seat, trying to get back to sleep. 

“You know the basics, though, do you not?” His voice is still raised.

“Infection is caused by sexual activity, and the transfer of sexual fluids, unless a certain dose is given directly to a patient, which is how the virus originally came to exist in the human species. Cut off the head of a vampire and you destroy the blood flow; they can’t survive a wound that big, whereas a bullet won’t do enough damage,” McCoy replies, quoting the textbook answer exactly. Every child is taught how to kill a vampire, in case of emergency, although hunting them isn’t encouraged. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand,” McCoy continues, still shouting. Uhura gives up trying to sleep and stares out of the window. “If they’re faster and stronger than humans, how on earth do we manage to kill the bastards?” 

“One of those questions better left unanswered,” Jim grins, pulling the car to a stand-still at a cross-roads. “We’re unpredictable, and although they’re faster and stronger, they’re not gods, y’know? Nothing like the books say. In a cross country race you’d have no chance, but in small spaces we generally have an advantage.” 

“Right,” McCoy nods, and Jim turns in his seat to consult Spock about which turning to take. They go left, passing the empty shell of what was once a block of flats, and come to the end of the ruins again. “It just seems a little cruel, to kill them, though, just like that.” There’s silence in the car, and Spock notes how Jim’s jaw tenses. 

“They’re animals, McCoy. Nothing else. The virus wipes out all their memories, everything that makes them individual; they don’t remember anything from their previous lives; their motive is to kill. Once they’re infected, that’s it,” he says, shortly, and they drive on through the ruins. 

Eventually, though, the silence gets too much. McCoy clears his throat, nosily. “These places give me the creeps,” he mutters, and Jim makes a noise of agreement. He can feel the doctor’s stare on the back of his neck. 

Abruptly, the car cuts out. “What the fuck?” Jim sighs, opening the door to check the engine. Spock watches him open the bonnet and hears what sounds like more swearing, and then the bonnet is slammed shut again. 

“Something’s not right,” McCoy says, quietly, and then Jim’s figure disappears from view. 

“Jim!” Uhura shouts, opening her door and sprinting round to the front of the car, barely missing McCoy’s door as it opens. 

“It’s alright,” Jim wheezes. He’s lying on the ground, looking up at the sky, a little dazed. “Battery slot opened unexpectedly.” 

“You idiot,” McCoy sighs, crossing his arms, as Uhura starts laughing. Spock leans against the car, dizzy with relief. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see the doctor looks a little relieved, himself. 

“We need a new battery, man,” Jim reminds him, still on the floor, and after that they’re back on the road within minutes. “You all thought I was dead, though,” Jim smirks, looking at Spock in the rear-view mirror. 

“At least we’d know where you were for sure,” Uhura mutters, and McCoy chuckles. 

“Still, I fooled you,” Jim continues, ignoring her. 

“No, you got taken down by an automatic slot on a _car_ ,” McCoy rebuffs, laughing harder now. 

“Oh, see, that! – that’s a nervous laugh of relief,” grins Jim, and Spock can’t help smiling a little. 

“Indeed, it is unlikely for anything to attack in daylight,” he adds, and Jim sets his seat back until Spock can’t breath, grinning at him in the mirror.

“C’mon, just admit it, you were worried,” he cajoles, and Uhura twists the dial of the chair so Spock can draw breath again. 

“Don’t get too cocky,” she warns, laughing, as Jim struggles to drive in a straight line as the chair adjusts. 

“No ma’am,” he salutes. Spock gets the maps out again, finishing a bottle of water as he finds their route. His pulse slows, but there’s a cold sweat on the back of his neck that confirms Jim’s words exactly. Jim is possibly the only solid thing in his life, his truest friend, and Spock is unsure as to his course of action, should Jim cease to exist. 

By nightfall, they’ve reached another wood. “I’ll drive,” Spock offers, and they switch just as the sun slips behind the trees. Jim falls asleep almost instantly, his head lolling on the head-rest of the seat. McCoy is asleep too, having moved to the back earlier, and Uhura takes over the maps in the front passenger seat, holding a small torch in hand as they drive.

“I assume you have questions for me,” Spock says, quietly, after they’ve driven for a while. 

“Why did you leave?” Uhura asks, equally quietly, her hands folded on the map. 

“It was unavoidable,” Spock states, eyes on the road. “I met Jim Kirk.” 

“And he changed everything? What about your life? What about our lives?” she asks, and he can hear the barely concealed anger in her voice. “You just disappeared! I was suspected of murder for two months before they decided you’d been killed in England, or been taken hostage by a revolutionary group!” 

“For that I am sorry,” he replies, tapping his thumb on the wheel. “Jim requested help. I am a better navigator than he, and I have a better understanding of legal systems. He needed to return to America; I could help.”

“So, what, you stole a boat or something to avoid customs? Jesus, Spock, I thought you were _dead_ ,” Uhura splutters, hitting her hand against the dashboard in irritation. 

“We commandeered a boat. After that I had no choice but to stick with him. He told me the truth, Nyota. The government would have us believe that these vampires are a disease engineered by the Vulcans; this is a lie. They created it themselves,” Spock explains, and Uhura sighs, slouching back in her seat with a total lack of grace. 

“Everyone _knows_ that, Spock; you were always just too trusting of the system,” she says, sadly, after a minute. “No one ever believed the bullshit they told us, apart from you.”

“Then you understand why I cannot return. How am I to teach one child how to discern a certain hieroglyphs from ancient Greek when a creature is ripping another child’s throat out?” 

“How can we change anything?” Uhura half-shouts, exasperated. 

“How can you change anything? Why are you here, Nyota? Did you not leave your own degree, your own home, in order to avenge your parents?” Spock replies, trying to keep his voice level.

“I thought they were on a trip. I came out to meet them, for a surprise. They were gone; no one knew where they were,” she says, and there’s silence in the car.

“I am sorry for your loss,” he says, finally, and Uhura makes a noise of annoyance.

“It’s not like you don’t know how it feels,” she mutters, and Spock winces. It’s true; his mother was a scientist in one of the labs near the first break-out. She had been one of the first casualties. 

Time passes in silence, thick and blanketing the car, as Spock drives on. At one in the morning McCoy wakes up, stretching a little in the back, and they change drivers. By morning, Spock calculates that they’re close to the lake, and as the sun rises to full height in the sky they find the water. A fat oval of blue is stuck obnoxiously in the middle of the wood, at the bottom of a hill, and there is a small house a little way behind it. 

“Hmm. Thatched,” Jim remarks, rubbing at his left eye with the heel of his hand, and loads his gun. 

∞

At midnight, Jim creeps out of the car and down the hill, followed two minutes later by Spock. Uhura and McCoy bring up the rear, each carrying five of the gun magazines and a long knife each. Jim has the sharpest, with two handguns and a revolver stuck into one boot. “If all goes well, we can wash in the lake,” he whispers to Spock as they get to the house, and then kicks the door down. 

The spotlight Spock carries illuminates a man, squinting in the light, his black hair matted and sticking up at odd angles. A few more seconds of light reveals that he’s tied to a chair, with someone else back to back in a similar chair roped to him. There’s blood on his shirt, as well as something that looks like a skewer protruding from his right shoulder. Jim winces, and the man opens his mouth weakly.

“Behind you,” he croaks, and Spock pulls Jim down to the ground with him as something leaps over them. It hits the far wall, clinging onto the brickwork, and the torch shows them the face of a vampire. 

“Get the men,” Jim shouts at Spock, and launches himself at the creature. It meets him head-on, and they slam into the opposite wall as Uhura and McCoy race in. Spock cuts the dark-haired man free while the doctor extracts the skewer, and Jim grabs it from his hand as he and the vampire go shooting in the other direction. In the darkness it’s impossible to tell who has the advantage, but the moonlight catches blond-brown hair and Jim goes flying. 

“Hurry,” Spock commands, and Uhura helps the dark-haired man out of the house, setting him down on the grass as she loads a handgun. McCoy unties the second of the men, who is slight, curly-haired, barely old enough to legally drink, and carries him out to lie beside the dark-haired man. “Jim?” he shouts, and there’s a crash and a muted gasp. 

“Yes?” Jim croaks, and there’s the dull hiss of a sharp blade piercing flesh. “Do you have another skewer? They’re kinda useful for holding these guys down.” 

“No, I don’t have another skewer,” Spock sighs, turning on his torch. The beam of light shows Jim grinning at him, blood splattered on his left eyebrow. He’s managed to pin the vampire to the ground with the skewer, squatting on the vampire’s thighs, and Spock turns the light off just as he hacks through its half severed neck. “Charming,” he mutters, and searches the floor for anything useful. The house appears deserted, so he slips out to help McCoy patch up the two men. 

Five minutes later, Jim appears through the doorway, having doused the place in gasoline, and throws a match back. 

“Isn’t it stupid, destroying every house with a vampire in it?” Uhura calls, standing with her hands on her hips. 

“What do you mean?” Jim asks, confused. 

“Well, we could have stayed there tonight,” she explains, exasperated. 

“But – it’s thatch,” Jim replies, his forehead wrinkling.

“Jim has what one might refer to as a flair for the dramatic,” Spock notes, dryly, and Uhura sighs. 

“Some help would be useful, here,” McCoy grouches, finishing the stitches on the younger of the two men. “What’s your name?” he asks, and there’s a pause.

“Chekov,” the man says, staring up at them. “Vhere am I?” 

“You’re with friends,” Jim reassures him, as the other man tries to sit up. 

“You killed the other two?” he asks, and Jim nods. “Thank God. Hikaru Sulu, pleased to meet you,” he introduces himself, and rubs uneasily at his head. 

“Do you normally pick so many people up when you’re killing vampires?” McCoy asks, after a couple more minutes spent dousing wounds in antiseptic and iodine. 

“Nope,” Jim replies, mouth full of pins and strips of bandage as he tries to simultaneously stitch up and bandage Chekov’s shoulder. “You’re the first.” 

“What did the vampires want from you?” Spock asks Sulu, one hand on his shoulder.

“I’m a mechanic and engineer. We both are; we specialise in heavy artillery and machinery,” Sulu explains. “I was working on a prototype for a new government tank when we got captured. They were trying to find out where it was kept; I only had the plans.”

“Where are the plans now?” Jim asks, pausing in his unwrapping of a fresh roll of bandage.

“I ate them,” Sulu admits. “It seemed sensible at the time.” 

“What, you ate the paper?” McCoy splutters, looking disgusted.

“Oh, no, I ate the computer chip. It was like swallowing a pill,” Sulu replies, cheerfully, and Jim grimaces. “Well, at least we can recover it, right?” 

“I don’t think we _want_ to,” McCoy says, darkly, and then picks Chekov up. “Let’s get these back to the car.”

“Wait, no, I think we’ve got some tents in the boot – let’s stay here. We all need a bath, anyway,” Jim suggests, and runs up the hill, returning a minute later in the car. They set up a hasty camp by the side of the small lake, pitching a tent for Sulu and Chekov to sleep in. Uhura finds a sleeping bag and curls up like a cat, while Jim, McCoy and Spock take turns keeping watch. It doesn’t take long for dawn to break over the horizon, and once it does, Jim sprints down to the lake, shedding clothes as he runs. 

“Mother of God, my eyes,” McCoy mutters, covering his face. Spock remains unaffected, silently calculating if Jim needs new bandages, and then goes back to the maps and the pictograms. 

The lake is freezing, cold as the grave when Jim splashes in and dives head-first into the water. He hasn’t been clean in a long time, and it seems like the perfect opportunity. Once the initial brain-freeze is over, he can open his eyes and swim around. The cold soothes his cuts and scrapes, washing away the dirt between his toes, even as he breathes in the smoke and ash from the burning house. He dives deep, shutting his eyes and taking massive strokes under the water. The cold fades as he gets used to it, and when he opens his eyes the water is murky blue, clearer and lighter as he looks upwards towards the rising run. 

As he swims, his toe touches something ice cold. Frowning, he looks under the water, trying to find out what it is. 

“Spock!” he shouts, splashing to the shore. “There’s something in the water!” 

“Don’t be such an infant,” McCoy grouches, groggily opening his eyes.

“No, it’s not a creature – there’s something, a machine, in the water,” Jim pants, hands on his knees, standing bent double and dripping water everywhere. Spock hastily folds up his maps and puts them away. 

“Put some clothes on, please,” Uhura asks, hiding her eyes behind her hands. 

“Oh, who’s being an infant now?” Jim smirks, still panting from the run, and then there’s a rustle of fabric and Sulu’s head comes out from the tent.

“Did you say there was something in the lake?” he asks, sleepily, and Jim nods. “Oh, that’s the tank.” 

“You keep a tank in your lake?” splutters Jim, and coughs as he swallows water down the wrong way. 

“Well, it seemed like a –”

“Let me guess, it seemed like a sensible idea at the time?” McCoy interrupts, and rolls his eyes when Sulu looks abashed. “Why the hell would you do that?” 

“We needed somewhere out of the way, and since the lake was there, and the house was nearby,” Chekov chimes in, and Sulu nods, sagely. 

“It’s not the prototype we were working on, but – ”

“Oh, shit, you mean, you own this place? Did I torch your house?” Jim asks, suddenly, and Sulu shrugs.

“It was just a holiday house, really. Been in the family a while.” 

“You sure know how to leap without looking,” Uhura snorts, somehow managing to make it look elegant at the same time, and Jim sighs. 

“Right, well, is the tank useable?” he asks, grabbing McCoy’s coat and wiping himself down. Spock wonders if Jim has any kind of consciousness of his own nakedness, and then remembers that it’s never bothered him before. In any case, he is wearing a pair of white briefs, which is something, even if they do cling and go see-through when wet. 

“Of course, I wouldn’t have put it underwater if it wasn’t,” Sulu says, looking affronted. “There should be a small switch underneath a boulder by the willow tree.”

Jim trots off again, followed at a distance by Spock, and finds the willow tree. There is a switch, and for a second after he clicks it, nothing happens. Then, distantly, there’s a rumbling sound, and the water bubbles. Suddenly, with a heaving, groaning sound, a platform rises out of the lake, and a grey-green creature emerges, settling on the shore like a child of the water. 

“That has got to be the ugliest tank I have ever seen,” Jim states, pulling on his black trousers and hastily doing up his boots. He tucks the back of his shirt into his trousers and climbs up onto the side of the tank, finding the release for the hatch at the top. 

The tank isn’t a conventional model. It has the usual top hatch, but also a smaller side door, which Spock presumes is for use if injured parties need to be brought in, but the door is partially invisible. The caterpillar tracks are smaller than average, but still look fairly powerful, and the entire thing is much, much larger than what he’d envisioned. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Sulu come and stand beside him. 

“Beautiful, isn’t she?” he beams. “She’s called the _Enterprise_.” 

“When do we move in?” McCoy asks, from behind, as Jim bursts out of the side door, grinning hugely. 

“It’s amazing! There are bunk beds!” he shouts, and Uhura sighs long-sufferingly. 

∞

About an hour later, Jim has managed to move most of the jeep’s provisions into the tank. Uhura claims the bunk furthest away from everyone else, and Spock makes her a curtain out of a piece of the tent. The tank is divided internally into three rooms, each separated by sliding doors. The overall effect is that of a large flat; there is a room with bunk beds, with about two feet of space between each pair and a tiny kitchenette in one corner; the second room is half the size and has two large work surfaces and a chair, where McCoy promptly unpacks all the meagre medical supplies; the third contains the steering equipment, enough seating for Jim, Spock, Uhura, Chekov, Sulu and McCoy, and what appears to be bullet-proof glass in a long, wide windscreen. 

“This is amazing,” Jim breathes, sitting down in the centre chair on the deck. 

“Night vision?” Spock asks Sulu, who nods solemnly. “Fascinating,” he murmurs, and sits to the right of Jim. 

“This is all very well,” McCoy says, coming through from the other room, “but what do we actually _do_ now?” 

“I... hadn’t though about that,” Jim admits. “I guess we first have to decide if everyone wants to stick together.” 

Uhura sits down primly in a chair by a radio, a pile of Spock’s pictograms in her hand. “It’s better than being alone,” she says, over her shoulder, and McCoy leans against the doorframe, confusing the automatic door, which tries to decide if it should close or open. 

“She’s right,” he says, and Sulu nods. Chekov, who’s been mostly silent the entire time, slips into a chair a little in front of Jim, running his hands over the controls. 

“It stends to reason thet ve are stronger es a teem,” he murmurs, tapping his fingers over a couple of buttons. The windscreen comes alive, covered in white lines. 

“Is that a map?” McCoy frowns, and Chekov nods absently as the lines turn blue, solidify, and form a recognisable landscape. “Are we hacking satellites?” 

“Chekov is very good at that sort of thing,” Sulu offers. “We’re not likely to get caught hacking government satellites; they probably won’t even notice we’re there. Plus, we both used to work for the government.” 

“Can you bring up a list of locations in America with both lakes and forests, as well as a small house, perhaps a building, then?” Jim asks, cautiously.

“Jim, what are you thinking?” Spock inquires, leaning over to him. 

“McCoy mentioned something about this – if we can get images we can see if there’s recent activity around the areas, we might be able to see if there’s a vampire gathering,” Jim replies, as McCoy sits down next to him. 

Four locations pop up on the screen, each with a lake and a forest. Jim remembers his geography teacher once telling him that America had previously had many more lakes, but the war had destroyed them, along with the main cities. School seems like a very far away memory as he stares at the map. “Pull up the bottom left hand one,” Jim orders, and the image enlarges on the screen. “Does that look like a large building to you?” he asks, and Spock frowns.

“Is that movement?” he asks, and Chekov zooms in a little. “That looks like a gathering.”

“Where is that?” Jim asks, and Chekov brings up the location.

“Nero? I know him – mining business, isn’t he?” McCoy interjects, and Spock puts his hand on Jim’s shoulder.

“Nyota – the devil, with the violin, and the burning bush –” he begins, and Jim gapes.

“Nero, fiddling while Rome burns; Spock, is this, d’you think -?” he begins, and Spock cuts him off with a jerky nod. “Then we need to get there as soon as possible.” 

“Jim, that’s like suicide – if there’s a gathering of vampires there how the hell are we going to take them all out ourselves?” McCoy asks, and Jim bites his lip.

“Sulu, are there weapons on this thing?” 

“We’ve got two heat-seeking missiles, a lot of ammunition, but I don’t know about any bombs,” Sulu admits, and Chekov spins around in the chair.

“I ken do zat!” he volunteers; “I haf treining in ecksplosives.” 

“How old are you, kid?” McCoy asks, raising an eyebrow.

“Sewenteen,” Chekov grins, and Jim internally wails.

“Oh, oh great, he’s seventeen,” sighs McCoy.

“Listen, it’s our best shot; there’s no way the government is going to listen if Nero is a big trader or an important miner, so we’re just going to have to do this ourselves. I’m sure if we hit them with something powerful we can do this.”

“Wait, wait, if we can get someone inside the gathering, we can get footage and send it to the government – perhaps we can get backup that way?” Uhura volunteers, and Spock nods.

“That sounds like a more logical approach. After all, we do not know for certain if an explosion will destroy the vampires in the way beheading does,” he reminds Jim, and McCoy bites his lip, shaking his head.

“That means one of us has to risk our life getting in there,” he rebuffs, and Jim frowns, trying to decide. 

“Let’s just get there first, ok?” he says, ending the argument. “How long’ll it take to get within firing range of that place?” 

“I estimate twenty hours, Jim,” Spock says, before Chekov can reply. “If Sulu navigates with McCoy and Uhura, Chekov and I can get to work on the explosives, and have it ready by the time we arrive.” 

“Everyone clear? Then let’s punch it,” Jim grins, and McCoy sits down in the seat beside him. 

“I really hope you know what you’re doing, Jim,” he mutters, as Spock reminds Sulu about the handbrake. 

“Me too,” Jim admits, and the tank rumbles to life around them. 

∞

They take a long route, avoiding any small towns or major cities, which isn’t difficult, seeing as that part of California is mostly destroyed and reduced to rubble. Jim alternates between searching maps and pulling up any information he can find on Nero. 

“Jim?” Chekov sends him a news article on the ship’s computer, which pops up on a screen by his chair. 

“Nero’s wife was killed?” Jim murmurs, frowning at the screen. “D’you think that’s why he’s searching for revenge – is this virus his way of getting back at whoever killed her?” 

“He’s certainly getting revenge – at all of humanity,” Sulu says, quietly. 

“Wait, that’s it: the government must have had something to do with her death!” Jim shouts, making Chekov jump in his chair. McCoy, who was dozing in the chair, almost falls backwards, his arms flailing as he struggles to sit upright. “That would explain the break-outs. Nero allowed the vampires to escape in order to wreck havoc on the government systems.” 

“Jim?” Spock’s head appears around the doorframe. “This tank appears to be going at a faster speed than I anticipated. I estimate we’ll arrive sooner than expected.”

“You can still get the bomb made, right?” Jim asks, tapping his fingers on the armrest of the chair. 

“It’s almost complete,” Spock replies, the smallest of smiles on his face. Jim grins and turns back to the newspaper article as the tank moves onwards, bringing them ever closer to Nero’s fortress.

**iii.**

“You ready?” Jim grins, pulling the black sweater over his head. Spock loads the small hand-held revolver and slips it into his boot, picking up a long knife and a tiny grenade.

“Indeed,” he replies, as Jim does the same, strapping his favourite knife to his arm with two leather buckles. “You have the camera ready?” 

“Chekov? McCoy? Can you see Spock?” Jim asks, pressing a button on his left wrist. 

“Crystal clear, Jim,” McCoy replies, and Jim nods, clapping Spock on the shoulder as they slip out of the side door on the Enterprise. The tank is pulled up two hundred meters from Nero’s lake, hidden in the woods, just far away enough not to be seen, and close enough to make a speedy rescue if need be. It’s dark already, with no moon, not ideal circumstances, but they make their way past the lake, scouting out the area for possible threats. 

“One at the door,” Jim whispers to Spock, indicating the lone vampire. “Is he smoking?” he asks, incredulously, and Spock sighs, fitting a silencer to the gun. Two shots has the vampire backed against the wall, hissing, and Jim stakes each hand to the brick with a small dagger. Its head falls to the ground a second later, and Spock steps back, his mouth pulled into an expression of distaste. The cigarette is still clasped between its lips, and Jim reaches down and snags it. He’s about to take a drag when Spock raises an eyebrow, so he opts for lighting one from the vampire’s pocket instead, exhaling a smoke ring. 

“Very impressive, Jim, but this isn’t what the government want to see,” McCoy mutters, over the earpiece, and Jim grins, putting the cigarette out in a quick movement as he throws it to the ground, lit end first. Spock is already at the door, picking the lock with one of Uhura’s hair-pins, and he bows sardonically as he ushers Jim in. 

The corridor beyond the door is dimly lit, clean, and empty. Jim pads quietly down it, checking the cracks at the bottom of the doors for movement. “Is there anyone here?” he whispers to Spock, who frowns, pulling his heat-sensor goggles on. 

“Next room,” he replies. “Just one.” Quietly, hardly daring to breathe, Jim picks the lock of the door and slips in, bracing himself for the worst. 

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” McCoy says, in his ear, and Jim blinks, hardly daring to believe his luck. 

The lone vampire is sitting at a desk, a long window in front of it, reading a newspaper, oblivious to his presence. Jim moves soundlessly to stand behind it, removing its head in a swift movement that seems almost thoughtless. For a second he’s confused as to why the vampire was reading a newspaper, but it seems to be one of the illegal pornographic comics that are big on the black market. That would explain the obliviousness. Still. 

“Stronger, faster, better vision – but hearing is a problem,” he mutters, smirking, as the head falls slowly to the ground, leaving a slick trail behind it. 

“Jim, look,” Spock whispers, hand on his shoulder, and Jim looks up from the slumped corpse, through the window, into the room behind. 

“Chekov, start broadcasting now,” he manages to say, before he’s lost for words.

Neither he nor Spock have ever seen so many vampires in their life. They’ve obviously stumbled into the main control room for Nero’s gathering, as there is a control panel, and the window in front of them is for observation. The vampires are gathered in a vast, black wood-panelled room, with two windows and dim lighting. The overall effect is that of damp and darkness, and Jim feels a shudder running down his spine. As far as the room stretches there are the ugly, inhuman faces of vampires, their mouths open in a single, unanimous chant. 

_Nero_. 

“Oh God,” Jim gasps, and McCoy’s voice crackles to life in his ear. 

“Get the hell out of there, Jim, we’ve made our point to the government, now get out so we can blow the goddamn place up,” he yells, half deafening Jim, and Spock pulls him through the door, down the corridor, and towards the exit. Jim has a bizarre moment of clarity in which he wonders why it was so easy to get in and find the gathering, before there’s a sickening knock to the back of his head, and he passes out. 

∞

McCoy’s voice is yelling in his ear when he wakes up, a little hoarse from overuse, and then the earpiece is ripped out and crushed under a black boot. 

“Not so clever, after all,” says a voice, and Jim comes face to face with a man who can only be Nero. 

“Nice to finally meet you,” he mutters, testing the strength of the bonds on his wrists and ankles. 

“Oh, we’ve got plenty of time to get acquainted,” Nero smirks, and sits down on top of what looks like a trolley. “In fact, I know you better than you’d think – I met you the day you were born.” 

“What do you mean?” Jim frowns, still tugging uselessly at his restraints.

“Your mother never told you? While she was escaping in one of the auto-pilot car-pods, your father was setting up charges in the major doorways. He took out two hundred of my lovely, perfect soldiers,” Nero explains, leaning back, and Jim suddenly becomes aware that he’s strapped to what looks like an interrogation table. His stomach drops to the region of his feet, and he flexes his hands as he tries to think of a way out. “So, we didn’t exactly meet, but I saw you,” Nero clarifies, flexing his fingers. 

“Where’s Spock?” he asks, mouth dry, reaching with his left middle finger to just touch the button on his wrist. His hand cramps, but he can’t give up; hopefully he can broadcast Spock’s location to the Enterprise, and they can get him out. 

“Next room along. Can’t you hear the screams?” Nero smirks, and abruptly slaps Jim across the face. “You should just have left well enough alone, James Tiberius Kirk. You should have gone on killing single vampires with your little friend for the rest of your life, dying one day with him by your side. He was always going to outlive you, anyway.”

“What do you mean?” Jim splutters, tasting blood in his mouth. The stench of sweat and blood-lust inhabits the entire room, mingling with the darkness and the muffled thumps on the walls. 

“Another thing you weren’t told? My, my, Mr. Kirk – you need better friends and relations.” Nero slips off the trolley, using a key from around his neck to unlock the top level. Jim’s stomach judders again as he takes in what’s inside; cruel, wriggling things, glinting in the dim light; long, curved knives with cruel blades. “Your little Spock is half Vulcan, dear boy – he’s going to live for at least double your lifetime before he dies.”

“That’s impossible,” Jim grunts, spitting blood onto the floor. “He’d have told me.” In the back of his head, though, thoughts begin to wriggle, as difficult to dismiss as the creatures in the trolley. Spock’s odd sense of humour, his stiffness of conduct, the way he always cut his hair so it hung over his ears – Jim cut himself off before he shredded years of friendship to pieces. 

“And risk you perhaps backing out on him? You may have claimed to disbelieve the government; but deep down, like everyone else on this god-forsaken planet, you loathe his kind. You hate that they have better resources, better technology, better _logic_.” 

“Enough!” Jim shouts, and Nero picks up one of the shiny, wriggling things just as someone punches the side of his face.

“And stay down,” the man orders, gruffly, jamming the heel of his boot against Nero’s neck. Jim wasn’t even aware vampires could pass out or be knocked out cold. 

“You learn something new every day,” he chuckles, weakly, as McCoy undoes the restraints on his wrists. 

“That bastard; I’ll rip his _bones_ out,” McCoy mutters, as Jim slumps against him.

“Bones,” he says, and giggles a little, weak with fatigue and relief. “I should call you Bones.”

“Yeah, you can call me whatever you like, let’s just get you out of here,” the doctor sighs, looping one of Jim’s arms around his shoulder and pulling him out of the room. Jim doesn’t know how they get out of Nero’s catacomb of tunnels and corridors, pausing and holding their breath as creatures stalk past, but a door opens and McCoy mutters a thank you into an earpiece, dragging Jim out through the darkness and fresh, sweet air towards the Enterprise.

“Where’s Spock?” Jim whines, right hand clawing at McCoy’s chest. 

“We’ve got him already; Uhura’s taken care of that. Wouldn’t want to get in her way, I can tell you that,” McCoy replies, laughing grimly as they open the side door to the tank and slip in. 

“Hell hath no fury like a woman who, um,” Jim begins, and then passes out as he’s given a sedative. 

“Exactly,” McCoy soothes, and checks his temperature. 

Five minutes later, Jim’s eyes fly open. “The bomb,” he says, weakly, and McCoy rolls his eyes as he’s pushed out the way while Jim practically flies into the main room of the Enterprise. “What’s going on?” 

“Uhura planted it, I think we should be good to go now,” Sulu replies, frantically typing commands into the system in front of him. 

“Why isn’t it exploding?” Jim asks, hands clasping on the back of Sulu’s chair. 

“She’s not out of there yet,” McCoy says, suddenly, and Sulu nods.

“I’ve no idea where she is – both she and Spock haven’t returned yet,” he mutters, and Jim grabs a gun from the main chair. 

“Well, I’ll just have to go and find them, then,” he says, setting his jaw, and is out of the door before anyone can stop him. 

“Does he just run on nervous energy?” Sulu asks, after a minute, and McCoy sighs. 

“No, he runs on food, like every other man,” he mutters, and charges after Jim. He even believes it for a minute. 

∞

“You’re crazy, Jim,” McCoy hisses, as Jim stalks back towards the fortress. 

“No, I just think individually,” Jim corrects, and frowns into the darkness. “Is that a motorcycle?” 

“Oh, God, what are you thinking now?” McCoy asks, after a minute, and then holds up his hands. “Actually, I don’t want to know.” 

“Get on,” Jim grins, settling himself onto the motorbike. McCoy watches for a minute as he hotwires the system, getting it started within seconds, and then sits down behind Jim. “Oh, and load your gun.” 

“Load my gun? Why? What are we doing?” McCoy asks, suddenly very worried, and Jim passes him another gun.

“Well, I’m going to drive, and you’re going to fire. A lot. As soon as I say, ok?” he explains, and the engine roars happily under Jim’s expert hands. 

“Why do I have a bad feeling about this?” is all McCoy manages to say, and then he realises why, because Jim is driving through the doorway of the fortress, as fast as the motorbike will go, through the corridors, and into a small room. There are at least ten vampires there, who all look up with varying degrees of surprise on their faces.

“Shoot, now!” Jim shouts, and McCoy pulls both triggers hard. A spray of bullets pins the vampires against the walls temporarily as they shoot past, and then they’re in the next room while McCoy reloads. 

“How the hell are we going to get Uhura and Spock out?” he shouts, as they roar through the next room, a cacophony of sound and bullets. 

“We’re creating a disturbance. Ask Sulu if they’re back yet,” Jim replies over the sound of gunshots, and McCoy shouts something into his communicator. 

“No, not yet,” he shouts back, once Sulu has replied to him, and Jim turns a sharp corner. “We don’t have much ammo left, Jim!” 

“One more circuit,” Jim calls, and they make it through one more room before the bullets run out completely. Abruptly, they’re met with a wall of vampires. “Oh, shit,” mutters Jim, and McCoy wonders if he’s going to be torn to pieces. “Hang on,” Jim whispers, and the motorbike ploughs through two of them, a third catching its claws on the doctor’s shoulder, digging into his skin as he howls in pain. It’s left behind a second later as its body collides with a doorframe in a sickening crunch, leaving only fragments of nail behind in the skin. 

“Oh, that’s going to hurt in the morning,” McCoy groans, darkly, and pulls one long nail out of his shoulder just as Jim drives through a door and out into the night. He wraps his arm around Jim’s stomach and hangs on, pretending he’s not embedding the heat of Jim’s skin into his mind, like he is with the feel of him between his thighs. 

“Is that Uhura?” Jim shouts, turning on the headlight, and they can make out the figures of Spock and Uhura hurrying to the Enterprise. 

“Then let’s get out of here,” McCoy grins, triumphantly, as they pull up next to the side door.

“But – the motorcycle,” Jim says, torn between getting away and leaving his new toy. 

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, I’ll buy you one, just get in,” McCoy shouts, and slams the door behind them as they get in. “Sulu, blow the damn place to hell.” 

“My pleasure,” Sulu calls, and the earth shakes violently beneath them as the bomb detonates.

“What was in that thing?” Jim asks, bewildered, as they gather in front of the window to watch the fortress burning. The flames seem to reach the sky, touching at them like the fingertips of desperate children, and Jim wonders belatedly if they should have tried to bargain. With vampires, though, he doubts they would have come to any kind of conclusion. 

“Explosives,” Spock states, blandly, and passes out on Uhura’s shoulder. 

∞

Jim’s still riding high on adrenaline, watching the burning wreck of Nero’s building, when he notices that there are figures moving in the flames. 

“This isn’t possible,” he whispers, and Sulu looks out with him. 

“Uh, so,” he begins, and Jim feels his energy flag and protest. He’s going to need a lot of sleep after all of this. “The bomb didn’t work, then,” McCoy says, hollowly, from the door. “Oh God.” 

The figures seem to have spotted the tank, though, because Jim can see them grouping up, and the next moment they’re growing bigger. “Sulu? I think we’re going to have to move. Like, _now_.” 

“Registered, Jim,” Sulu says, his voice hardly shaking, and his fingers fly across the controls. “Hang on.” 

“To what?” McCoy yelps as he slides across the floor, landing in an undignified pile in Jim’s lap. 

“Come here often?” Jim manages to say, and McCoy gives him his best death glare. 

“Every day, it seems, but that might not be happening in future,” he grouches, and tries to extricate himself. Jim’s hands are on his shoulder and his knees, though, and the tank is moving so wildly that it hardly seems worth it to actually get a move on. He resolves to stay where he is; if he’s going to die by vampire attack, it might as well be on Jim Kirk’s lap as anywhere else. 

There’s a sound of ripping metal, and Sulu blinks at the warning lights on the screen. 

“Is that daylight?” Jim squints, his hand tightening on McCoy’s knee. 

“No, that looks like –” Sulu looks up from the controls, anxiety written into every tight line of his body, and his face splits into a grin. “That looks like government hovercrafts, Jim.” 

Just then, a vampire throws itself against the windscreen, and all three of them jump. 

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Jim sighs, and pushes McCoy of his lap, grabbing the dagger lying on the floor. No one has any time to think of anything to say before the top hatch is open, and Jim’s feet have disappeared out into the open air. 

“I have this feeling, Sulu, that Jim might be suicidal,” McCoy says, as if talking about the weather, and then drags himself after Jim. 

∞

Jim tries to work out what day it is when he opens his eyes, staring at the bottom of McCoy’s bunk, but it’s useless. He could have slept for days; no one was completely sure what they were doing when they turned tail and scampered out of California in the early hours of the morning after they’d killed Nero. Sulu had picked up a lot of activity, all of it human, around the explosion site, as they were running away, so they assumed the government had believed them and gone to clear up the mess. 

A rustling sound above alerts him to the fact that McCoy is in his bunk too. “Bones?”

There’s no reply. Jim carries on anyway. “Isn’t it strange that all of this was caused just by one woman, huh? I mean, they must have done something really terrible to her for all this to happen; people don’t just go abruptly crazy like that over normal deaths, do they?” 

Still no reply. 

“Hey, Bones, are you asleep?” Jim asks, climbing shakily out of bed to check. His body hurts all over, stiff and bruised, and perhaps he’s a little mentally damaged from lack of food, but that all melts away when he stands up and looks up at McCoy’s bunk. 

McCoy’s bunk, which contains McCoy. Who is jerking off. 

“Oh God,” Jim moans, biting his lip hard to stop himself from saying anything else. 

“Shit, Jim, _warn_ me when you get up suddenly like that,” the doctor snaps, pulling his covers over his legs. His dirty t-shirt has ridden up over his stomach, showing slightly tan skin and the barest hint of muscle definition. 

“Hey, hey, I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it,” Jim manages to get out, hoping that was a vaguely sexual tone he said it in. Judging by McCoy’s facial expression, it wasn’t, but the next second the doctor is pulling him up onto the bunk with him, the smell of sweat and sex hanging heavy between them. “It’s a perfectly natural human reaction,” he whispers, and suddenly there’s the sound of music coming from the room next door.

“Goddammit, I’d forgotten this isn’t my house anymore,” McCoy sighs, wiping the back of his hand across his forehead.

“Well, we’ll just have to be very quiet, then,” smirks Jim, and pulls his shirt over his head. McCoy makes an appreciative noise that goes straight to his groin, his hands already on Jim’s shoulders, pulling him down, as he drops the article of clothing onto the floor. 

“Quiet, huh?” McCoy husks, pulling his own shirt off, and then stuffs it into Jim’s mouth. “I wouldn’t trust you to be quiet more than I would trust my wife to make me a cup of coffee.” Jim makes a muffled sound of disagreement, but then McCoy is opening his trousers, running his index finger down the length of Jim’s cock with the practiced steadiness of a surgeon, and the only thing Jim can manage is a choked moan, his arms shuddering. He props himself up over Bones, one hand on either side of his head, one knee on either side of his hips, and digs his fingers into the pillow, hanging in for the ride. “See, it seems to me that you’d be loud in every aspect of life, whatever you might think about sneakin’ up on vampires,” Bones continues, and licks his palm slowly, reaching down to wrap it around Jim’s cock. 

Jim tries to say _Oh, but I can be quiet_ , but Bones presses his finger to his lips, smirking a little, and pushes the hair off his forehead in a gesture that’s becoming all too familiar to Jim. In the back of his mind he’s wondering if this is going to be a big mistake – he hardly knows McCoy, they don’t know what’s going to happen about the government, and now all of them are living together – 

“Hey, stop thinking so loudly,” McCoy warns him, his fingers cupping Jim’s chin, and he licks gently down the side of Jim’s jaw, biting slightly as he comes to the curve by his ear. “We can figure it out later.” 

Jim has to admit the doctor’s approach is a lot more favourable, and in any case, he’s never been too good at multitasking. He buries his face against the crook of McCoy’s neck, shutting his eyes, and the doctor tangles the fingers of his left hand into Jim’s hair, pressing against the skull, his right hand working smoothly over the length of Jim’s erection. The music from the next room filters through, like a haze around them, and Jim’s back hits the roof of the bunk room, making a loud, painful sound. McCoy pulls their bodies together until Jim is flush against him, his cock against the smooth flesh of McCoy’s lower chest, slicking the skin there with precome. 

“You ok?” McCoy whispers, his lips against Jim’s neck. Jim tries to give an affirmative answer, because really, how can he not be ok in this position, but McCoy does a clever manoeuvre so Jim is lying next to him, face to face, and pulls his pants down so they’re both naked, covers coiling around their legs like creepers. Jim’s hands reach desperately for him, catching on his shoulders, his chest, his neck, trying to touch everywhere at once. The t-shirt in his mouth is soaked with spit, making his mouth dry, and he chokes a little on it until McCoy takes pity on him and pulls it out. “But keep quiet,” he warns Jim, and hooks his hand into the bend of Jim’s leg, pulling it up over his own hip, so Jim has his legs spread. The tip of his cock touches against McCoy’s, and they both hiss instinctively, pleasure blossoming like sparks formed by hotwiring. 

McCoy does things infinitely slowly, tracing the lines of muscle on Jim’s chest, pressing two fingers along the crease of hard muscle that leads down from each hip. His eyebrows are furrowed, and Jim gets the feeling that he’s being examined, his every flaw brought to the surface by those eyes. Strangely, it doesn’t feel uncomfortable; if anything, he’s more determined to live up to McCoy’s expectations, and shifts closer to him, licking at his clavicle, his collar-bone. McCoy wraps his fingers around Jim’s right hand, looking him in the eye, and sucks hard on Jim’s first two fingers. Jim bites his lip so hard he’s half afraid it’ll bleed, but keeping silent is a priority here. Still looking at him, Bones drags his tongue from the root of Jim’s fingers up to the tip, and then pulls them out of his mouth, moving Jim’s hand down until it’s between his spread thighs. 

“Have you ever done this before?” he asks, quietly, his breath coming in puffs against Jim’s ear. 

“Once,” Jim gasps, as McCoy presses one of Jim’s finger’s inside him. Jim winces, unused to the feeling, and bites McCoy’s shoulder as he continues to press it further. 

“Really?” McCoy chuckles, as Jim wriggles his hips a little, and Jim pants breathlessly. 

“Fine, twice,” he bites out, and McCoy plants open-mouthed kisses on his neck, against the pulse. 

“Third time lucky,” he promises, and adds another finger. Jim bites his lip again, trying to adjust to the angle. His hand hurts a little, and he’s unused to doing this to himself – the other two times, it was always someone else. Someone else who convinced him it would be a good idea, and then ended up fucking it up. Bones, however, seems to know what he’s doing. He coaxes Jim into taking one more finger, although Jim doesn’t really feel anything special with just two. “Crook your fingers,” McCoy orders, and Jim does. 

Something spikes down his spine, starting low, and twists like creepers on ruins up his spine. “Ah,” he gasps, his other hand clenching on the covers, and McCoy raises himself up on one elbow to watch him. 

“Higher,” he whispers, his tone almost fevered. Jim does as instructed, pushing his fingers gently further inside himself, and crooking them again. It’s better, better than he’s ever felt before, and he presses harder, catching on something until he whimpers, twisting on the sheets and trying not to moan too loudly. McCoy pulls him closer, and Jim presses his mouth against the doctor’s shoulder, sucking on the skin even as he fucks himself harder, hips rocking down to meet his own thrusts. McCoy’s erection bobs against his own, drops of precome rolling down onto his skin and against the sheets until they’re soaking. Jim can tell he’s close, too, and unclenches his hand from the bedclothes to wrap around Bones’ cock, stroking in jerky, uncoordinated movements until Bones is making low, almost wounded moans that make Jim wish he was fucking him. 

“Add another finger,” McCoy urges him, his left hand tracing the line of Jim’s throat and neck. “C’mon,” he cajoles, nipping lightly at the skin of Jim’s shoulder, and Jim can’t even move, can hardly breathe, can only rock down onto the three fingers inside himself. “Useless,” McCoy chuckles, albeit weakly, and snakes his left hand down between them to where Jim’s fingers slide in and out of himself. He stills Jim’s hand and slides one of his own fingers inside, just above Jim’s. 

Jim makes a choked, desperate moan, burying his face against McCoy’s chest, and comes instantly, bone-jarring pleasure slamming through him like a wild-fire, a sunrise across a desert. His release splatters across McCoy’s chest, over the tan skin, a sharp contrast, and McCoy rubs the tip of his cock against the drops that land on Jim’s chest, smearing it. He kisses Jim then, properly, his tongue exploring his mouth like foreign land he wants to claim, and moans into the kiss as he comes. 

“Do we have to figure it out now?” Jim asks, sleepily, his hand still tangled between them, and Bones pulls a sheet over them with the last of his strength.

They’re both asleep before he can answer. 

∞

“Spock?” Jim emerges from the bunk room, hair sleep-tousled and cow-licked. 

“My shift is not yet over,” Spock murmurs, completing his second infra-red area search of the night. 

“Nah, s’not about the shift,” Jim sighs, slouching down in a chair next to him. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something.” 

“Continue,” Spock nods, pulling up a satellite image of the surrounding area. 

“When I was with Nero, he told me something,” Jim begins, fiddling with the rough edges of his nails. He’s aware he got off easily compared to Spock, who still has bandages from the torture. Jim doesn’t know what happened in the room next door, and he suspects Spock will only ever tell Uhura, if she’s lucky (or not quite so lucky, Jim’s not sure how to phrase that, mentally or otherwise), but that’s less important for the moment. “He said your father was Vulcan.” 

Spock nods. “Now you see why I was treated more harshly than you,” he says, quietly.

“What? But surely Nero knew the government created the disease?” Jim gapes, and Spock gives him a vaguely amused look from the corner of his eye. 

“Not everyone distrusts authority instinctively, such as you do, Jim,” he reminds him, typing a short series of commands into the system. 

“Oh, right,” nods Jim, leaning forward to rest his chin on his hand. It makes sense that Nero would use something he believed the government had created to destroy the country, in a twisted logic sort of way that Jim supposes psychos employ a lot of the time. “But y’know, you could have told me. I mean, I’m not, like, angry, but still -”

“It is of no real importance. I calculated that the only effects would have been either distrust, or indifference. After all, I doubt you have crossed paths with others of my kind. I myself would hardly know another Vulcan if I saw one.”

“You’re neither one nor the other,” Jim realises, quietly, and Spock nods. 

“It would be lonely, were it not for your friendship, and that of the others aboard,” he murmurs, and smiles, in his small, sly way.

“Well, I’m going back to bed,” Jim yawns, after a pause, standing up and stretching.

“Give my thanks to the doctor,” Spock calls after him, and Jim looks back, quickly, but Spock seems to have meant it in a purely innocent way, as thanks for the treatment of his wounds. He misses the tiny smile that plays around the corners of Spock’s mouth, long after he’s gone. 

∞

In the middle of the night, when Jim is caught in a comfortable limbo between consciousness and sleep, he hears a rustling of fabric, and turns his head just in time to see Uhura slip into the main room of the Enterprise, where Spock is still on duty. There are murmured voices, a long pause, and then the smell of scrambled eggs and tomatoes wafts through the bunk room. 

“Somethin’ wrong?” McCoy husks, his voice rough from sleep. 

“Nah, everything’s fine,” Jim grins, his lips pressed against the skin of Bones’ neck. 

∞

Time passes in a relatively relaxed fashion in the weeks following the explosion at Nero’s fortress. Jim tacks a calendar to the wall of the bunk room, and they set the tank down temporarily next to Sulu’s old holiday home, or what’s left of it. The lake serves as a nice place to bathe, and Jim gets to work improving the Enterprise’s bathroom with Sulu and Chekov. A week later, when repairs are finished, they decide to check out a small clan of vampires just west of the border, and the tank sets off again. Life seems easier, for a while, as they travel, and Jim even decides to sleep late one morning, an arm wrapped around McCoy’s waist. He’s half asleep, drifting through dream land, when someone shakes his shoulder. 

“Jim? We’ve got a transmission from the government.” It takes a second for the words to sink in, and then Jim springs out of bed, sprinting into the main room of the Enterprise wearing only a pair of his usual black combat trousers. 

“James Tiberius Kirk?” a man on the screen asks, one eyebrow raised.

“Yup, that’s me,” Jim grins, running a hand through his hair awkwardly. “How can I help?”

“The government would like to express our gratitude for your actions. You and your fellows performed an admirable service in the name of humanity,” the official says, his voice carefully neutral. 

“Well, since it was your mess that we cleaned up, I’d say you’d better be grateful,” Jim states, his face expressionless. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Uhura gesturing frantically, but he ignores her. 

“That is an inconvenient truth, but a truth none the less,” admits the official, frowning a little, and then he straightens again. “As a reward, you are allowed to keep the tank _Enterprise_ , and all charges against your names are to be dropped. We will allow you to make repairs at our military factories, and we’re willing to have you on board to help clean up the last of the vampire problem in America.” 

“Thanks, but no thanks. We prefer to work alone, as a team,” Jim shrugs, as McCoy stumbles through the doorway, similarly bare-chested and sleepy eyed. “Late-night brainstorming session,” he says, indicating the doctor and grinning.

“I see,” says the official, his face bland again, and nods at the crew. “Once again, thank you for your help.” 

The transmission ends, and Jim slumps back in his chair. 

“Well, what d’you think of that?” he grins, looking at McCoy.

“I think we could all have got steady jobs and nice beds, and you ruined it,” McCoy grouches, sitting down next to him.

“Aw, c’mon, Bones, you don’t want a steady job,” Jim teases, and rests his feet on the back of Sulu’s chair. “Hey, tell you what – Sulu, let’s build some decks onto this baby. Proper living quarters, what d’you say?” 

“I think... I know an engineer who can help us with that. Scottish guy,” Sulu grins, as Chekov nods at him, a similar smile on his face. 

“Then let’s do it,” Jim smiles, and the sun breaks over the hills as the Enterprise trundles across California. 

ξ

“I’ll be sad to leave her,” Jim admits, shutting the small door behind him as he shoulders his bag and follows McCoy towards the willow tree.

“Well, someone else’ll need her, someday,” the doctor shrugs, flipping the switch. Abruptly, the tank disappears from view, hidden in the deep waters of the lake. Jim watches her three decks disappear from view into the depths, and sighs deeply. A few bubbles rise to the surface, popping quietly in the midday sun. 

McCoy chuckles. “Look at you, getting all emotional over a tank.” He turns away and Jim slaps him lightly on the back of the head. 

“Shut up. It’s only been our home for, what, five years?” he reminds McCoy, as they walk back into the forest. Jim pretends he doesn’t lean slightly McCoy’s arm as they walk, feeling the warmth of his skin. In a clearing not far from the lake, blending seamlessly into the grass, a softly humming piece of machinery is waiting. As McCoy and Jim come into view, the camouflage disappears, revealing the newest model of the _Enterprise_. It hovers one foot above ground, built with enough deck space for each of them to have their own room, along with a kitchen, mess room and bridge. 

“Yeah, but you can’t deny that this one is a lot easier on the eyes,” McCoy says, gesturing at the machine in front of them. Jim watches Sulu jump out, accompanied by Scotty, their newest crew member, to do a last check on the outside, and nods. 

“I couldn’t exactly say no to Sulu, could I – not after I burnt down his holiday house,” Jim replies, darkly, and they make their way on board. 

The _Enterprise_ wastes no time getting into the air, like a flying fortress, and Jim sits down on deck to watch the world spread out beneath them. He remembers, with a wince, the first time they’d discussed upgrading the old tank (“You’ll never believe what I found!” Sulu had grinned, waving a small computer chip around in front of them like it was the holy grail. Even McCoy, who Jim thought had the sturdiest stomach out of all of them, had turned a little green), but the feel of the gently humming machine around him more than makes up for it. He feels like he’s home, for the first time in a very long time. 

“Jim? There’s an incoming transmission from the government,” Sulu says, and Jim brings it up on the main screen. 

“Admiral Pike,” he grins. Over the past few years they’ve had brief dealings with the government, usually via Pike, a middle-aged man who seems to appreciate the work the crew of the _Enterprise_ does more than the rest of the army. 

“Jim Kirk,” Pike nods. “I’m sending you this message due to the arrival of some good news – we’ve managed to cut the number of vampires down to under fifty.”

“Excellent,” Jim beams, and is about to say goodbye when Pike clears his throat. 

“The problem is, other countries haven’t been so lucky, and after the success you’ve had here, we feel you’d be the best for the job, provided you were working as part of the army,” he continues, and Jim slouches down into his chair. “Jim, you’ve cut the number of vampires here down to under fifty in five years. I dare you to do better in Europe.” 

Jim hears McCoy muttering something about sticking his dares where the sun doesn’t shine, and sighs, rubbing his chin while he contemplates the idea. 

“Have any of you ever seen Paris?” he asks, finally, looking at the rest of the crew. They all shake their heads, and Jim shrugs at Pike. “Ok, why not?” 

“Welcome aboard, then, Captain Kirk,” Pike grins, and the transmission ends. A few minutes later, a flight-plan to London is send to Chekov, and Sulu sets them on course. 

“Captain Kirk indeed,” McCoy murmurs darkly, sitting down next to Jim. 

“Well, that means I can order you about,” Jim grins, suddenly realising the possibilities. 

“Don’t go getting any ideas,” McCoy warns him, as the engines on the _Enterprise_ fire up, and they set out for England. 

∞

Jim’s just got into the swing of things -- the dull thud of a vampire’s head falling to the ground, the slight smell of copper on the air – when Bones interrupts him. 

“You know you’d be twice as effective if you just used those training programmes and taught yourself how to use a sword,” he grouches. Jim wipes sweat out of his eyes and ducks a particularly vicious right hand of claws. 

“Maybe,” Jim calls over his shoulder, decapitating the second vampire and allowing Chekov to take out the last one, “but you wouldn’t like me half so much if I took the easy way out, would you?” He looks back at McCoy, his hair sticking out at odd angles, a cup of coffee in one hand and a scythe in the other, looking for all the world like the Grim Reaper, robbed of robes and given a hangover instead, and grins. 

“Since when do I like you, Kirk?” McCoy raises his eyebrows. 

“That’s right,” Jim nods, thumbing blood off his bottom lip. The doctor’s eyes follow the movement. “You don’t like me. You _adore_ me instead.” McCoy rolls his eyes. 

“Come back inside. This is a ridiculous excuse for summer,” he mutters, and takes the newspaper from Sulu, stalking back into the _Enterprise_. 

“This is a British excuse for a summer,” Jim calls after him. He sets about checking the bodies for valuables, any clues as to where other nests are, and for anything else useful. He finds a pocket watch and some scribbled symbols, which he passes to Spock. The Vulcan stands next to him, watching the sun rise, fat and luminous, behind the bruise-coloured clouds. 

“Do you ever think about space, Jim?” Spock asks, suddenly. Jim’s heart clenches for a second. He wonders what it’s like, knowing half of you belongs on another planet, one that has forsaken you. Wonders what it’s like to not know who you really are, who your ancestors were, what they looked like, or even what your mother tongue sounds like. Jim used to think his family was messed up, but really, he’s in a pretty good situation, all things considered. 

“Nah,” he grins, pushing damp hair out of his eyes. The clouds open up on them, and the clearing the Enterprise has stopped in begins to smell of clean rain and good earth. Spock hands him a spade so they can dig graves. “I’m happy with my feet on the ground for now.” 

The sound of someone shouting reaches their ears. “Spock! Jim! We’ve got orders!” 

“You were saying?” Spock says, a tiny smirk on his lips, as Jim hoists himself onto the _Enterprise_ ’s ladder. Jim rolls his eyes. He’s on Earth, doing what he does best, with the people he loves most. The quiet sound of thunder rumbles gently in the distance, the cool scent of the unknown on the breeze.

Space can wait for another two hundred years or so.


End file.
